I was happily searching Google the other day, something I do quite often. Then I noticed one result that stuck out: A page on Aboutus.org was listed twice. But the second time it had a bunch of gibberish before the URL. It appears to me there was a <br&gt...

I would agree. Today I searched for a term that showed 2.5 million results, but the odd thing was it showed only ONE result and then right after it there was the gooooooogle to view the next pages. A few minutes later it was back to normal. Now that could have been a seperate bug, but it could also have been along the lines of what you are saying. October 20, 2008

I did a quick search on my keywords. Yes relevant sites came up, but the logo for my site was on someone else's, and a logo for a site nothing to do with mine was on my site. Not one of the images made sense, and it really distracts from it all. July 30, 2008

The whole "make a site for visitors not engines" thing is out the window. Now I'm expected to add nofollow to certain links and if I buy links I could be penalized for it if the person I buy for doesn't nofollow them.

My view is that a site's creditability should only go up or down if the links they have are junk. Whether or not the ads I put on my site are paid or my own, they reflect on the quality of my site. So I only put ads that my readers would benefit from.

I think the key here is for Google to find a way to look at these links and see if the source and destination are credible. If a site about dogs is linking to viagra, then it's clear they don't care. But if a site is about dogs and links to leashes, it's relevant and shouldn't matter if the link was paid or not.

Using htmlentities isn't enough, using it will only give you a false sense of security. You can still do it with unicode and other types of encoding. If you really want XSS protection you need something like PHPIDS. May 29, 2008

The title of the post should be "Auto Surf Traffic Exchanges", as "Manual Traffic Exchanges" do provide real people. The key is learning how to effectively get their attention and get them to signup. Something I've done (1,000 subscribers to my blog pretty much all from them).

Your findings are happening to many people, which is why I started a series on my blog about how to spot bad exchanges (in fact I found this page while searching Google to see what kind of feedback people were giving on my series hehe).

Hope this helps someone because really you can be effective in this kind of advertising. Sorta like TV commercials, you can make a commercial and spend all this money showing it, and not get any sales from it. But once you learn what's affective it can work great ;-)

Well the SEO part could make sense. If you are an SEO, and you want to knock a competitor out, and you know their site ranks pretty well, there might be some that'll take the opportunity. But that would more likely be a smaller group I'd think. January 28, 2008

Ha! My wife recently was checking out Craigslist, and some of the descriptions are funny. One was giving out a flat screen TV with year lease, another only would accept Red Sox fans =P January 12, 2008

I could see this as a feature if you knew it was going to happen (say a check box that says "I'm thinking about it, hold it for a few days while I think"), but to do it automatically I don't think that's right. Too many people will then try to register it elsewhere, and not know that it's just being held. January 09, 2008

You'd need it to be done by experts. Otherwise people will continue to write reviews on topics they know nothing of, giving good reviews to sites that experts would say is totally wrong. Or giving bad reviews that experts would say is a good site.

For a while in Rhode Island there was a frenzy of barcodes and sound codes. The newspapers had bar codes on every page, so you could scan it and it would bring you to a site with more info. The TV would send a noise signal of some sort and make your computer go to the website.

The down fall is it wasn't already integrated like the cell phones mentioned.. You had to connect this odd barcode scanner to your computer and hook it up to your TV somehow (I forget). So the technological impared couldn't do it, and they were the people reading the newspapers rather than reading them online =P